By 16, made $10K in commissions doing door-to-door sales (luck was on my side and sold the entire calculators’ inventory to a store I walked in for gum a week after I was hired).

By 17, started making websites for profit

By 18, founded/operated a networking service (selling shells, bots, etc. for the IRC community)

By 21, dropped out of 4 majors at 3 different universities

By 23, sold my first bootstrapped business: localized nightlife portal

By 24, managed to screw the sister portal for Montreal, Canada. Long story short, $180,000K in checks from a company that bankrupted within the next year - all checks bounced. I was back to ground zero.

By 26, sold +500 copies of a ‘turnkey website’ software (+plugins+customizations): ~$150K

By 29, co-created/launched a product that made 1 million dollars in sales the first 24 hours

By 30, had created and successfully launched 20+ products in different niches before selling it all, taking time off, getting married, fathering a baby.

By 33, back to ground zero.

Why I am saying all this?

Simply because despite all that experience and income made over the years, I am here today because I need your help! I have tried investing in different businesses and lost the biggest part of my money like that (another on just living my dream life).

How can you help me? Well, I am currently assessing the market for an idea that’s been on my mind for quite some time now and my market happens to be YOU. Yes, you heard that right. I want to work with smart bootstrappers that are looking to minimize the time and money spent (or otherwise just completely ignored) on tools they need to run their business (i.e. Google Analytics, Moz, Knowem, KeywordSpy and the list goes on).

I’d love to automate most of the time-consuming tasks every one of us needs to go through on these different tools, connect the dots where/when beneficial and most importantly, offer it on either a pay-as-you-go form or dirt cheap subscription model.

Something that I found on these forums that could resemble (at a very basic level only though), what I am talking about is this:

Hi there, I'm Andrey (or shazow on the internets).
I co-founded a now-defunct YC startup in 2010 and got soured on the fundraising route, then bootstrapped a social analytics service that got acqui(hi)red by Google where I worked on Google Analytics and Google+ for a while. I'm a software engineer by training, but I enjoy learning to do everything from design to sales and marketing. I also do a bunch of open source stuff and authored/maintain one of the most distributed Python libraries.
My …

Finally, I will leave you with a prototype I put together over the weekend to automate brand name check (similar to http://namechk.com) and profile creation (similar to http://knowem.com) but for a fraction of the price ($24.75 instead of $84.95)

I’d love to hear your comments on the idea in general, if you’d be looking for something like this, if you’d be interested in a lifetime unlimited account in exchange of being a serious beta tester, etc.

On the prototype, if you can just comment on the ‘flow’: try/demo -> pain point -> solution -> cta. It’s a method I have never used or experimented with before but thought I’d hear your comments before giving it a try.

Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back from a big number of you. Even if it’s to just yell at me: “STOP, and look for some other idea”

Hey @jadb, I’m honoured to be your case study. That reminds me, I should post an update on how Briefmetrics is going.

I like your idea. I’ve pursued similar ideas in the past, for example: http://wedomainsearch.com/ — collaborative domain searching. Bringing this one level higher into cross-service brand search is definitely interesting. I’ve also spoken with some people who were interested in building a similar prototype for searching trademarks, also. I think there is potential here.

Thanks @shazow! I actually found out about briefmetrics.com (which I’d love to hear an update on) when I was trolling on the forums. I will reach out to you early next week when I have the first version up and ready.

I am currently assessing the market for an idea that’s been on my mind for quite some time now and my market happens to be YOU. Yes, you heard that right. I want to work with smart bootstrappers that are

To me that kind of thing sounds a bit “used car sales guy” - I’d work on the pitch a bit.

I think the idea sounds reasonable - “selling tools to the miners” has always been a good strategy, and the